For most of his 90 years, Enzo Ferrari's classic sports cars shipped without radios, because Ferrari declared that the engine provided the necessary musicat least for people who could afford a car with a prancing stallion on the hood. For those of us with more mundane vehicles, there's been a steady progression toward better and more varied in-car entertainment: We saw push-button radios in the 1950s, eight-track and cassette players in the Vietnam era, and CDs and CD changers in the 1990s. Three 21st-century trends will further change the shape of in-car entertainment over the next several years. Compressed-audio digital music players, priced from about $500 to $1,000, can hold mostor allof your music. And satellite radio is arriving: Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio will compete to become the standard. Last, in-car DVD video players (for the backseat crowd, naturally) will increasingly be found as a built-in option in new cars. (For more on what's coming in this field, see our online extra "Driving the Future.")

Here we evaluate six new products designed to make taking your fun with you on the road easier than ever. Many more products are on their way; we'll continue to cover this category in the Gear & Gadgets section.

Bill Howard is the editor of TechnoRide.com, the car site for tech fans, and writes a column on car technology for PC Magazine each issue. He is also a contributing editor of PC Magazine.
Bill's articles on PCs, notebooks, and printers have been cited five times in the annual Computer Press Association Awards. He was named as one of the industry's ten most influential journalists from 1997 to 2000 by Marketing Computers and is a frequent commentator on TV news and business shows as well...
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